Women Talking

Women Talking by Miriam Toews
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a thinking book, not an action book, but the questions it provokes are deep and not easily answered. A group of women meet to try to figure out whether to stay in a community that can't/won't protect them and their children or leave into a world they know nothing about and possibly put their salvation in jeopardy. How do you respond to violence without being violent yourself? What is an acceptable sacrifice--your faith for your children, your purity for your faith, obedience for subjugation? Who do you save, and by leaving do you put others in harms way? The questions go on, and sometimes they seem to wrap around themselves to end up where they started. And in the end, we don't really know how it all turns out, so the questions continue and you find yourself contemplating the questions long after the final paragraph.

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how we are required to share the sun with other parts of the world

Trembling Aspen, the tree with leaves that tremble, the tree that is sometimes called Women's Tongue because it's leaves are in constant motion

She one explained to me that, as a Molostschnan, she had everything she wanted; all she had to was convince herself that she wanted very little.

If we don't know that we are imprisoned then we are free?